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watched in impotent rage, and thousands who had previously been apathetic turned overnight into what one of them called “stark, raving abolitionists.” The return of Burns had cost the federal government forty thousand dollars, or perhaps fifty times the price he would have brought at the slave market.
    Meanwhile a growing war of words was raging over the subject of slavery. In June 1851 the magazine National Era began running a serialized fictional story by a Lane Seminary professor’s wife named Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had been inspired to write by her outrage at the Fugitive Slave Act. The story she wrote continued in installments through forty weeks and gained a large following. Published the next year as a book titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin , it became a runaway best-seller. Based on careful research, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was meant to show the evil not of southern whites but of the system of slavery. Some of its slaveholding characters were kindly, and its chief villain was Connecticut-born Simon Legree, who had moved to Louisiana and bought a plantation. Such refinements were lost on proslavery readers, however, who reacted with howls of rage and a flurry of books of their own purporting to show that slavery was a benevolent institution and that slaves were far better off than white northern factory workers. It remained unclear why no one sought the allegedly privileged status of slave. On the other hand, so many slaves were willing to attempt escape that southerners had felt the need of a ferocious new Fugitive Slave Act.
    Despite the rival publications and the controversies stemming from the Fugitive Slave Act, the country could at least take comfort in the fact that slavery had not been an issue of dispute in Washington since the passage of the Compromise of 1850. That changed abruptly in 1854, and ironically the man who sparked the change was the chief architect of the final passage of the Compromise of 1850 and perhaps the politician who had the most to lose from a revival of the national political controversy over slavery. Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas had not intended to reignite the slavery debate in Washington in 1854. He had wanted to get a transcontinental railroad built across the plains and mountains to connect California with the rest of the country.
    In the strange logic of politics, railroad building connected directly to slavery. Douglas shared the mistaken but widespread belief that building such a large railroad required federal subsidies. That in itself made the railroad’s construction a political prize to be fought over by the various sections of the country, each wanting the route to originate in its region. During the 1850s the only sort of federal subsidy that was considered feasible was some sort of land grant, along the right-of-way. The government could not grant land until it was properly surveyed, and the land could not be properly surveyed until it was within an organized territory. Thus, in order to build a transcontinental railroad where he wanted it, stretching westward from Iowa, Douglas had to organize a territorial government in the remaining unorganized lands of the Louisiana Purchase, lands that had been forever closed to slavery by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Southern congressmen and senators would therefore be hostile to Douglas’s bill for two reasons. First, they would wish to see the transcontinental railroad built on a southern route rather than across the central plains. Second, and more significant, organizing those lands into territories would be the first step toward turning them into states that, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, must be free states.
    To line up the southern votes he needed in order to get his bill through Congress, Douglas had to include language repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the new territories to slavery under popular sovereignty. His Kansas-Nebraska Act set up a large Nebraska Territory on the northern plains and